Main menu

Limp-Wristed Leadership

I’d previously posted on what I thought Israel’s military game plan would be. Strike hard, decisively, and continue to drill down until it hurt Hizbollah enough to cough up its captives and retreat.

What I didn’t account for was the Bush Effect, and at this stage, I can’t support the continued Israeli military operation.

When sub-Bush took aim at Iraq, I was all for the war. Not because I thought the President was right, but because taking out Iraq, I reasoned, would save Israel the trouble of doing it next time he decided to transfer his aggression on one country instead onto Israel. I imagined he’d learned from ubber-Bush, who did a half-baked job on an enemy that respected only full measures of action. After the heated rhetoric, the 20,000-pound bombs, and America’s overwhelming might, I expected “shock and awe” to be deafening.

It was more like Babe Ruth needing to hit a grand slam but instead dribbling a bunt that barely made the pitcher’s mound.

Like little Bush’s attempt at war-making, Ehud Olmert has lived down to his roots as a lawyer and political hack. I know the code words that could have been spoken to trigger a callup, a swift and deep attack, and a truly devestating hit. It would have killed more Lebanese civilians, but Israel would have been saved thousands of missile strikes.

Instead, this ‘hit and wait,’ ‘hit and wait’ policy provided the enemy with ammunition for public relations and their allies and non-supporters of the Jewish state with the time and space to push Israel back on the political battlefield.

Now we are left with the impression of thousands of milling reservists, the reality of over one hundred buried soldiers, and my former home in Northern Israel a wreckage-wracked and economically devestated area, from which it will take years to recover.

Prime Minister Olmert, you failed in the kind of mission one gets but one chance to execute: safeguarding the security of the Israeli people and land. Like Bush, you have forfeited the credentials a state leader is given in stewardship, not in perpetuity.: the stewardship to manage the future of the country. The casualties of the next few years, when Hizballah lobs missiles over separation forces to land in Israel, are on your head. And you have given the radical right ammunition, ammunition to which they had no rights to acquire, to be the next weapons of mass political destruction.